[Foundation-l] Questions about new Fellow

[MZMcBride]

Hi.

As Daniel noted in his earlier e-mail to the list, Achal Prabhala is now a
Wikimedia Fellow.[1] I actually missed this announcement as it didn't hit
wikimediaannounce-l or this list (foundation-l), it apparently only got
posted to the blog, but that's not really here nor there.

There have been rumblings about some of the surrounding circumstances that I
think warrant consideration and discussion. Achal is a member of the
Advisory Board[2] but isn't very active in wikis/open source. A few
questions pop up in my head. Is there a concern about such an individual
being a Wikimedia Fellow? That is, someone who's not particularly attached
to wikis/open source? All of the other Wikimedia Fellows have fairly strong
editing backgrounds. The edits by Achal seem to be rather sparse:
http://toolserver.org/~vvv/sulutil.php?user=Aprabhala

More importantly, is there a concern about an Advisory Board member being
chosen as a Wikimedia Fellow? Is there a conflict of interest there? Is
there a concern about the appearance of impropriety?

Achal has a growing influence on Wikimedia, particularly its new operations
in India. This has included being part of the hiring decisions, etc. This is
more of a consultant role, making his selection as a Wikimedia Fellow even
stranger. And his growing influence and power in such a big part of
Wikimedia's five-year strategy is making people wary. I think conversation
and engagement (on this list and elsewhere) would be very good in a number
of ways.

MZMcBride

[1] http://blog.wikimedia.org/?p=2748
[2] http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Advisory_Board